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“Oh? And…is this something you want to do?”
Sophie plastered a smile to her face as both the Italian ambassador and Jason swept across the room toward her like a pair of trout after the same fly.
“Yes, Baba,” she whispered. “I truly think I would. Certainly a bloody sight more than I want to be here right now.”
“Now, child,” her grandmother whispered back, “as the Americans would say, make nice.”
And the beastie shouted, Run!
Of course, she didn’t. Not then, at least. Being her stolid, staunch little self, Princess Sophie would no more have shirked her responsibilities than she would have danced naked in the palace fountain. In February. Except that, over the next several days, the beastie inside grew larger and nastier and hairier until she finally realized, two days into the conference in Detroit, that if she didn’t take some sort of drastic action to get her head screwed on straight again, said head was likely to explode.
So now, seated in the taxi with her bodyguard Gyula, on their way to the airport for the return trip to Carpathia, Sophie pressed one hand to her roiling stomach as she craned her neck to glower at the equally roiling clouds visible through the taxi’s smeared windows. Oh, she’d come up with a plan, all right. Now all she had to do was pull it off. Without throwing up. Sane people simply did not do things like she was about to do.
Which is precisely what everyone would say: Whatever had possessed that quiet, dependable young women to do something so…so…impulsive? And even now, as her heart jack-hammered underneath her serviceable taupe raincoat, she’d left little to chance. Except, perhaps, for opportunity, which not even she could control.
Her heartrate kicked up another notch as she lifted a leather-gloved hand and yanked down the end of the muted paisley silk scarf she’d turbaned around her head. Should anyone ask, she hadn’t had time to wash her hair. Thus far, no one had.
“You are well, Your Highness?”
Though spoken softly, the words ripped through the taxi’s muggy interior, prickling the skin at the back of Sophie’s neck.
“Yes, yes, Gyula—I’m fine,” she said in their native language over the whine and thunk of the taxi’s windshield wipers. Although her bodyguard spoke English, after a fashion, she could tell the effort strained him. “The rain is making me irritable, that’s all.”
Gyula nodded toward the large Macy’s bag at her feet. “You did some shopping this time, I see.”
“I couldn’t very well come to the States and not pick up a few things, now could I?”
She thought she saw a trace of bewilderment flutter across the bodyguard’s features. Not that it was any of his business if she chose to go on a shopping spree. It was just that she never had before. In fact, it was almost a joke among the other European royals not only how much the Carpathian princess loathed to shop, but how hopelessly unfashionable she was. Not that it was likely, considering her recent purchases, that opinion would change.
They reached the airport a few minutes later, after which Sophie stood huddled underneath her raincoat while Gyula paid the driver and checked through their minimal luggage, wishing like bloody hell her stomach would stop its incessant torquing. The bodyguard then reached for both the shopping bag and her oversize canvas tote.
She clutched them to her, almost too late remembering not to let her eyes widen behind her glasses. “No, no—I’ve got them.” Then, silently, she and Gyula trooped through a sea of damp, harried bodies to the gate, only to discover their flight had been temporarily grounded due to the weather.
And if that wasn’t fate giving her the nod, she didn’t know what was.
“Shall I hold your coat, Miss?” Gyula asked after they wriggled through a horde of passengers to the waiting area. “We may be here for a while—”
“No!” She swallowed. Smiled. “No, thank you, Gyula. I’m fine, really. Except…” She scanned the waiting area, her stomach taking another tumble when her gaze lit on the international ladies’ room symbol across the way.
Blood whooshed in her ears. “I just need to…” She nodded in the direction of the rest rooms.
Gyula nodded in reply.
Sophie’s legs shook so badly as she crossed the crowded floor she could barely feel her feet. Once inside the ladies’, she ducked into a far stall, sending up a silent prayer of thanks that there were at least twenty other women in the rest room, which lessened the likelihood of any one of them noticing that the woman who’d gone into the stall wasn’t the same person who’d be coming out.
Her breath coming in short, fevered pants, she peeled off two layers of clothes to uncover a cropped, beaded sweater and a pair of scandalously tight Capri pants. From the depths of the tote bag, she retrieved a pair of black platform wedgies which would add a good five inches to her five-foot-four, a small makeup bag, and another tote, larger than the first and a different color, folded into quarters, into which she transferred…everything. Somehow.
Dodging a boisterous toddler streaking away from his mother, Sophie tottered across the rest room to a sink where she shakily managed to put in a pair of dark blue contact lenses, then applied the makeup she’d practiced putting on for two hours last night. Nothing remarkable about any of it, she told herself as she spritzed styling gel into what was left of her hair, willing it into spikes. Just an ordinary airline passenger freshening up after her journey.
Then the contacts settled in enough for her to get a really good look at herself.
Oh, my.
She’d seen Mardi Gras floats less gaudy than this. Her startled gaze darted from the daffodil-yellow sweater that seemed to be taking inordinate delight in clinging to her breasts, to her sparkling, ruby nails, her crimson mouth, her smoky-teal eyelids, her…hair. Only the truly desperate—or the truly mad—would have butchered it like that. And then bleach the remnants Barbie blond.
Unfortunately, now she looked like great-uncle Heinrich in drag.
She twisted slightly to get a look at her profile in the tight pants and let out a soft gasp at the rather pert little backside winking back at her.
Goodness—where had that come from?
Well, never mind. While it may have seemed more sensible to become as inconspicuous as possible, in this case she had thought it far more prudent to divert attention away from her angular, and possibly familiar, face to other, not quite as well known, parts of her anatomy. So men would leer and women would roll their eyes and point out how tacky she looked to their daughters, but what was a little indignity compared with losing one’s grip?
Ferris-wheel size earrings, sunglasses, perfume—she told herself it was strictly coincidence that the women on either side of her simultaneously left the rest room—a stick of chewing gum…and she was ready.
Stomach quivering, legs quavering, Princess Sophie Elzbieta Vlastos of Carpathia—aka Lisa Stone, Bimbette Extraordinaire—made her unsteady way out of the rest room and right past Gyula, who was alternately frowning at the rest room and his watch. Oh, but it was everything she could do not to break into a run—except she would have surely done herself a mischief in these shoes!—but she knew her only chance in pulling this off lay in her ability to feign nonchalance. And so, chomping her gum and feigning her little heart out, she strolled through the terminal, stopping at a newsstand just long enough to collect several paperbacks and at least one leer, and out to the taxi queue.
She sucked in the damp, heavy air like a newly freed prisoner.
Oh, she’d undoubtedly be tracked down, eventually—any first-year detective could follow her Visa card’s glowing trail—but it would still take a while to find her. Undoubtedly, the palace would assume she’d gone much farther than a Michigan township barely sixty miles away.
If she ever got there, that is, since none of the first half dozen or so drivers she queried had the slightest notion where Spruce Lake was. As the minutes ticked by, the nerves she’d managed to quell long enough to get to this point renewed their assault, blasting her nonchalance—timorous to begin with—to smithereens. Her mouth dry as dust, she darted a furtive glance over her shoulder as she approached the next taxi. By now, surely Gyula would realize she’d gone missing—
“Excuse me?” She bent over to speak to the driver, swiping a collapsed spike of hair out of her eyes. “Do you know how to get to Spruce Lake?”
The driver, the human equivalent of a bulldog, eyed her for a moment, obviously taking in her lack of luggage, her jitters, her getup. Her accent, which, due to a number of factors, was more English than Prince Charles’s.
“You from Australia or somethin’?”
“Or something. Well?”
“Yeah, I know Spruce Lake,” the driver said. “Had a cousin lived out that way some years ago.” He adjusted his ample form in the seat, scratched his chin. “Takes close to an hour to get out there, though. And then there’s my time gettin’ back…I dunno…”
“Name your price.”
He squinted at her. “A hundred bucks.”
“Done.” She yanked open the door and scrambled into the back. Even Sophie knew a gouge when she heard one, but haggling could wait until the other end of the journey.
Where she’d be free.
Steve Koleski could feel the music teacher’s worried gaze through the back of his denim shirt. “It’s okay, Mr. L.,” he said, frowning himself at the tangle of wires that had vomited forth the instant he’d removed the plastic cover from the outlet behind the refrigerator. Whoever had done this job—he used the term loosely—should be shot. “It looks worse than it is.”
“I may be old, Steffan, but I am not blind. That is too many wires for such a small area, yes?”
“Shoot, Mr. L.—this is too many wires for Detroit. Damn good thing that outlet sparked on you when it did.” Steve pulled out the mass, which reminded him uncomfortably of his brain that morning, began untangling it. “Coulda been a lot worse.” A shaft of sunlight sliced across the all-white room, warming a shoulder stiff from far too much yard work the day before, as low music with a lot of violins trickled in from the living room. At his feet, one of a trio of fat, black cocker spaniels whined for attention.
Mr. L. snapped his fingers. “Susie, come over here and stop bothering the man.” Then to Steve, “Could I get you a cup of tea while you work? It’s a good forty-five minutes before my next student.”
Steve stopped the grimace just in time. “Yeah. Sure. That’d be great.”
As the old man shuffled to the other side of the kitchen, Steve pulled his wire cutters from his belt, then set to work sorting out the mess as his thoughts drifted, for the hundredth time that morning, to the near blowup he’d had with his housekeeper before he’d left. No matter how many times he explained that things in aquariums go hand in hand with fourteen-year-old boys, Mac’s latest acquisition had nearly sent Mrs. Hadley off the deep end. Nor did he suppose Rosie’s penchant for falling asleep in strange places was sitting any too well, either. The poor woman nearly had apoplexy when she’d turned on the basement light and seen the three-year-old curled up at the foot of the stairs, fast asleep. Of course, she’d assumed she’d taken a tumble and that it would be all her fault and she just couldn’t take that kind of pressure at her age….
So why’d you take the job? Steve had wanted to ask the pinch-faced woman. But he didn’t dare. He needed Mrs. Hadley, even if he—or the kids—didn’t exactly get all warm and fluttery thinking about her. She was the fourth housekeeper they’d had in eight months at a time when the kids desperately needed stability. Something was going to have to give, and soon.
Steve frowned at the wire cutters in his hand. Trying to make everybody happy was a real bitch, you know?
He swiped his forearm across his eyes to sop up a bead of sweat: the instant the rain had stopped, the temperature had begun to climb. “You want a regular two-gang outlet, or four?”
“Four, I think,” he heard over the sound of water thrumming into a teakettle. “A kitchen can’t have too many places to plug things in.” The pipes groaned when Mr. L. turned off the water. “Plumbing’s next, I suppose,” he said on a sigh. The old man’s boiled wool slippers scuffed across worn linoleum; the kettle clanked onto the old gas stove. Then he made a sound that was a cross between a chuckle and a wheeze. “This house and I, we’re a lot alike, you know? Keep patching things up, get another couple years out of us. Speaking of which…after you finish in here, would you mind taking a look at the ceiling fixture in the guest bedroom? I think it’s coming loose.” The kettle’s shrill whistle was cut off nearly before it began. “You like sugar?”
“No. Thanks,” Steve said, taking the mug of steaming tea from the prim little man in his gray slacks, white shirt and brightly patterned bow tie quivering at the base of a chicken-skin chin. “The guest room, huh?” He took a sip of the tea, just to be polite. “You got a taker?”
The old man laughed. For fun, he’d registered his spare room with the local bed and breakfast association last year, although, since tourism wasn’t exactly Spruce Lake’s claim to fame, he rarely had guests. Every once in a while, though, somebody’s cousin needed a place to stay while in town for a wedding, or some family would find his listing on the association’s Web site on the Internet and spend a night in town on the way from somewhere to somewhere else. “Yes, Steffan, I got a ‘taker,’ as you put it. A nice young woman who called yesterday, said she needed someplace quiet for a few days, maybe longer.”
A mild tremor of curiosity moseyed on through but didn’t stop. “It will be nice,” the old man continued, “having a little company, especially at night. During the day, I have my students, I can go out…but at night…” He shook his head. “The nights are hard.”
Refusing to believe that sharp right hook to his midsection was some sort of agreement—it wasn’t as if he was ever alone at night—Steve looked down to discover he’d finished off his tea. So he walked over and rinsed out his mug.
“This young lady,” Mr. L. went on. “She sounded maybe…a little lonely?”
Steve shook his head, swallowing down a weary laugh. Honest to Pete—one drawback to living in a small town was that everyone knew your business. Ever since the divorce, no less than a half-dozen people had tried to steer him in the direction of assorted cousins, unmarried daughters, and best friends’ sisters. A half grin tugging at his mouth, he turned around, wiping his hands on a dish towel. “Mr. L.? Just for the record? If things get so bad I’m reduced to being fixed up with a total stranger, just shoot me, okay?” Over the old man’s chuckle, he added, “And how the devil does someone sound lonely?”
A pair of exuberantly bushy brows lifted over the tops of Mr. L.’s glasses. “Just listen to yourself, Steffan. Then you’d know.”
Steve went rigid for a moment there, then traipsed back across the kitchen to the nest of wires jeering at him from the wall, yanked out a pair to tape them off, crammed them back in, then slapped the outlet plate into place and screwed that sucker back on so hard, he cracked the plastic and had to go get a new one from his truck.
“Something the matter, Steffan?” Mr. L. asked when Steve returned.
“Not a blessed thing,” Steve grumbled, screwing on the new plate. Then, scowling, he gathered his toolbox and headed up the stairs, fighting off a herd of wriggling cocker spaniels…and even the slightest suggestion that the old man was right.
Like he didn’t have enough stress in his life, what with worrying about the kids, trying to figure out how to balance a million and one obligations. The last thing he needed was some woman who wanted him to make her happy, too. And no, he didn’t feel this way just because love had dragged him into a back alley and left him for dead. He was over Francine. Had been for some time. It was just…well, he just didn’t have time for lonely.
Let alone the aggravation that invariably accompanied the opposite.
“Steffan?” wafted up the stairwell a few minutes later, “I need to run to the store. I should be back in plenty of time for my student, but if I’m not, would you mind letting her in?”
“No problem,” Steve called back, watching out the window a minute later as, like an overfed hamster, the old brown Datsun stuttered out of Mr. Liebowicz’s driveway and crept down the street.
He’d just finished changing out the fixture when the doorbell’s chime made him jump. Before he could move, though, it rang again, accompanied by a faint, frantic, “Hello? Mr. Liebowicz? It’s Lisa Stone!” followed by the bell being leaned on until Steve thought his head would explode.
He barreled down the stairs and jerked open the door, only to be nearly knocked over by a streak of overly perfumed blonde shrieking “Bathroom!” on her way past.
“Straight back, first door to the—”
“Found it!”
The bathroom door slammed hard enough to shake the whole house.
Chapter 2
Steve and the dogs stood in the open door, staring down the hall, waiting until the aftershocks died down. The blonde wasn’t the only thing that had to go. So did that perfume. Whew.
“Hey!”
Distracted, Steve finally noticed the taxi waiting at the curb, the mastifflike driver glowering at him from his window. In what could only be called a daze, Steve wandered out onto the porch, allowing an oblique, disinterested glance at the stuffed shopping bag and canvas tote lolling against one of Mr. Leibowicz’s Kennedy rockers. “You payin’ the fare?” the driver asked.
But before he could answer, the blonde whooshed back past him and down the porch steps, trailing the scent of about a million flowers in her wake. Shoot, Steve didn’t know a woman could use the bathroom that fast.
“Of course he’s not paying the fare! Keep your shirt on!”
For some reason, Steve became transfixed with the way her short hair, like feathers, shifted and twisted in the breeze as she sailed past. The way the soft, sparkly sweater and black pants molded to her figure without strangling it.
The way she was about to fall off her shoes.
She glanced over her shoulder at Steve, then blinked a pair of the deepest blue eyes he’d ever seen on a human being, the color of the evening sky just before it swallows the sunset…
“Miss?”
“What?” Her head jerked back to the waiting driver. “Oh, right.” She shifted, clumsily, to balance the tote on her knee—when had she picked it up?—in which slender hands, tipped in ruby red fingernails, rummaged for several seconds before extracting a wallet.
Hel-lo…major ephinany time: long red nails made him hot.
He felt his brows do that knotting thing again.
For crying out loud, she wasn’t even pretty, not in any conventional sense—deeply set eyes with thick, natural brows, a high forehead, squarish jaw with a dimpled chin, a wide mouth. But what Steve saw—underneath several strata of makeup—were the unapologetically strong lines of good, solid peasant stock, a handsomeness he’d seen innumerable times in the faces of the women with whom he shared a common ancestry. He told himself the hitch of interest in his midsection stemmed purely from aesthetic considerations, a desire to photograph her, to catch the light playing across those compelling features.
She yanked out a wad of bills, then crammed the purse between her arm and her ribs. “Now…how much did you say?”
The driver glanced at Steve, then the blonde, knuckling up the bill of his ball cap. He cleared his throat, then mumbled something. Unfortunately, the man hadn’t counted on Steven having hearing like a hound dog.
“A hundred?” Steve was down the stairs in two seconds flat, in full macho protective mode. “Where’d you pick her up? Cincinnati?”
“It doesn’t really mat—” whatever-her-name-was began, but the suddenly obsequious driver stepped in with, “Ya know, come to think of it…it wasn’t as hard to find the place as I thought. Whaddya say we make it—”
“Fifty,” Steve supplied, just for the hell of it. For all he knew, maybe the man had picked her up in Cincinnati. Judging from the driver’s reaction, however, he’d apparently called the man’s bluff. There were, at times, definite advantages to having been a linebacker in a previous life.
A bunch of folds rearranged themselves into something like a smile. “Just what I was gonna say. How ’bout that?”
The woman looked from one to the other, her mouth open. When it finally snapped shut, Steve noticed her narrowed gaze had come to rest on him.
Huh?
Her mouth twisted, she peeled off five tens and handed them to the driver, who, with a wave and a impressive squeal of the tires, left.
Steve turned to introduce himself, extending his hand. “Hi, I’m—”
“Excuse me, but do I strike you as being a complete air-head?”
